‘The Most Efficient Vehicle on the Planet’
David Adamson and I are cruising down the road in a giant egg-shaped electric tricycle built for two. I’m driving-pedaling, and David sits on the little bench behind me. He keeps telling me when to adjust the gears. The throttle is cranked, the motor hums, and the speedometer says fifteen miles per hour. It feels like we’re going faster, though, because there are no floor boards, and the asphalt whizzes beneath our feet.
This ugly-cute vehicle is called an ELF, which stands for Electric Lightweight Fun. It is an eco-modernist rickshaw, some midpoint between an electric car and a commuter bike. Organic Transit builds these in North Carolina. The company launched in 2013 with a Kickstarter campaign. There’s no network of dealers yet, and David, who lives in Boulder, Colorado, is working as an informal sales rep. He says the manufacturer will pay him a $200 commission for each ELF that he sells.
David calls himself an evangelist for green living. He drives a tricked out Prius — by that I mean it has an extra after-market battery that helps the car get 95 MPG. He lives in a custom-built straw bale house, whose 14″ thick exterior walls make it ridiculously efficient to heat and cool. Trying to sell ELFs is the latest part of his mission. For the last few months he has been driving his own ELF around town. Passers-by often smile and stare, and he invites strangers to take it for a spin. The sales pitch is soft but ebullient. When he talks about this machine his voice climbs an octave, and he explains that the value transcends utility. “What I’m doing is adopting a low carbon life and having fun,” he says. Organic Transit calls ELF the most efficient vehicle on the plant.
Until recently David earned a living selling cork flooring as an independent manufacturer’s rep. He says the flooring manufacturer pulled his contract “because I was making too much money and they took the business direct.” He also receives a bit of money, he says, from inherited royalty interests in some Wyoming oil wells. He acknowledges the irony and says he’s glad to channel the cash toward his green initiatives.
The ELF is classified as a bike, not an automobile. So driving it requires no license, registration or insurance. It’ll lug up to 350 pounds of cargo and has a typical range of around 18 miles. Pedaling augments the work of an electric motor that propels the ELF up to 20 miles per hour. The 100 watt solar panel embedded in the roof will recharge the lithium-ion battery in about eight hours of full sunshine.
Yet so far David has sold none. The ELF is sleek, fun, and very expensive. A full-featured unit costs more than $7,000. As of last year Organic Transit had sold about five hundred ELFs. The founder of the company has boasted that Jerry Seinfeld is a customer, which hints at the problem. The ELF is a delightful oddity that invites one to imagine, if only for an instant, that the automobile is excessively elaborate, at least for townsfolk. But that idea quickly falls to pieces because of the ELF’s cost and bulk. It’s a naturally urban vehicle for which most urbanites could scarcely find storage space. For what the ELF costs why not just buy one really good bike? Or five.
If Organic Transit could cut the ELFs price in half, watch out. Literally. They’d be zipping all over the place.
David tells me to hit the brakes. We’ve just driven past a woman riding her bike. A potential customer? He hops out and waves her over. Her name is Angie Flynn, and David has no problem convincing her to take a test drive. Off they go.
“What do you think?” David asks afterwards.
“It was very cool,” Angie says. She then learns the price. “Maybe in the Boulder market, but I don’t know if that will work in Middle America.”
David snaps a picture of Angie sitting in the ELF and emails it to her. She now knows who to call should she come upon an extra seven grand.
Featured photo credit: by permission of Organic Transit via Flickr
Originally published at west.energy on March 11, 2016.
